Items related to On Her Way Home
Synopsis
Arizona Territory, 1886-1887: When her visiting kid sister is abducted and charged with being an accomplice to murder, Frieda Levie Goldson, distraught and blaming herself, abandons her husband and children in the frontier border town of Dos Cacahuates, and sets out to find the missing girl.
On Her Way Home is the third of Rochlin's highly-acclaimed historical novels about a Jewish girl's life in the American West, the Desert Dwellers Trilogy. Frieda, the trilogy's headstrong heroine, is seduced by Bennie Goldson's promises of love and adventure and flees the constraints of her traditional Jewish San Francisco family's kosher boardinghouse for an adobe on the Arizona-Sonora border. After six years of life on the frontier, she has learned why the Arizona Territory is called "The Nation's Roughhouse." Now, on her own in a scruffy hotel, three jails, a makeshift law office, a Jewish-owned inn, two boisterous courtrooms, and at a bizarre trial and melodramatic execution, Frieda ultimately learns where and with whom she belongs.
For this third book in the series, Rochlin sought a plot that would force Frieda out of Dos Cacahuates, population 200 (maybe), and into the center of Arizona life: Prescott, territorial capital and political cesspool. The true story of a family murder and kidnapping, adjudicated there in 1886-1887 under outlandish circumstances, provided the framework. Frieda and other trilogy characters mix with personalities and events culled from Territorial records and period newspapers.
From this partly true, partly imagined tale, colorful characters emerge: an East Coast couple on a literary assignment, a Tenth Cavalry veteran, a power-crazed sheriff, a girl-chasing district attorney, an unpopular territorial governor, and Jews of every stripe. Things happen; the more incredible they seem, the truer they are.
A little-known but timely variation on the inexhaustible immigrant family theme develops, one that shifts from group action against societal inequities--the customary focus of ethnic and women's stories--to responsibility for one's own misdeeds. Stripped of illusions, some amends made, more to be made, Frieda ultimately finds the true meaning of home and family.
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About the Author
Harriet Rochlin, a native of the multicultural Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights, has been researching, writing, and lecturing on Jewish roots in the Spanish, Mexican and American West for more than four decades. In addition to her landmark social history, Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West, and the historical novels of the Desert Dwellers Trilogy, her work has produced two Western Jewish collections--one historical, the other photographic, both at UCLA's Charles Young Research Library, Special Collections Department--as well as the first current and comprehensive guide to Western Jewish historical societies, museums and archives founded in the last fifty years. The Rochlin Guide can be found on her website, rochlin-roots-west.com.
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